Featuring Shawn Lawlor, Bryn Pottie, Merilyn Simonds, and David Elias.
Shawn Lawlor, author of Boom Road (Galleon Books, May 2024)
I began writing Boom Road in November 2020 as a means to draw creative energy out of my system, off my brain and onto something tangible. I didn’t realize it would be a novel. I’d attempted short stories on occasion but had mostly focused on screenplays, both feature film and television for years. I’m certain before this novel, the longest document I’d ever written was a biographical essay on J. Robert Oppenheimer while studying at St. Thomas University.
I started with one sentence: Most times when you see a pair of unused skates, they are lonely. I can’t recall why that phrase entered my mind one November evening as I was walking with my wife, one of the few forms of exercise we could utilize during the early months of the pandemic. I spied a pair of skates hanging in someone’s garage in our neighbourhood and it caught my eye. Perhaps it wasn’t the skates that were lonely but how I felt at that time: isolated from the world as so many of us were during that strange era.
When Jackie came to life, so did the characters around him, including the Miramichi River Valley — a character unto itself. I began retrieving childhood memories, interesting traits from certain people I’d known and the Miramichi itself. Not long after I began, I knew what I wanted the piece to be: a love letter to where I grew up.
Miramichi is a mystical place, a beautiful part of our great country, like so many other rural areas. The people that live there are often hilarious, something I wanted to convey in the dialogue. I’d hope to make the location, Jackie’s struggles, the humour and the not-so humorous parts relatable to anyone who’d grown up in a rural area. As so often happens with writing, so things happen in life: people find their own voices and it takes several turns.
Jackie, his wife, his friends, his dog – I wanted each character to have equal contributions to the book. In life, a small gesture can mean the world to someone. In Boom Road, the smallest of actions can have great significance.
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Shawn Lawlor is originally from Miramichi, New Brunswick. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Boom Road is his first but certainly not his last novel.
Bryn Pottie, author of The Great Lunenburglary ( Moose House Publications, June 2025)
Whenever people ask me, “How do you find the time to write a book?” I always tell them the same thing: “let everything else in your life completely fall apart and you’ll have plenty of time!” My debut novel, The Great Lunenburglary, was written in my childhood bedroom while living with my parents — conceived during COVID, finished in the wake of a breakup. I was desperate for a project to give my life direction and meaning, so I beat 100% of the shrines in The Legend Of Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom, then wrote a novel.
I don’t have the education required to write a book that expands the discourse or sheds light on an important issue or any of that fancy stuff. So, I decided to write a goofy one about teens stealing the Bluenose. Plus, Nova Scotia has enough serious books already. We’ve all had to process the tragic death of a loved one from alcoholism and/or drowning, after all.
The Great Lunenburglary’s setting was inspired by my youth in Lunenburg, but the voice and pacing were informed by my 15 years in Toronto, performing sketch comedy for drunk crowds and writing for children’s television — two audiences with very short attention spans. I tried to give this book a lot of broad appeal, but my primary goal was to give a smile to Maritime readers who have read less than half a dozen books since high school. By that metric, it’s been a great success!
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Bryn Pottie grew up in rural Nova Scotia, then moved to Toronto to become a big hotshot writer. After bumbling around the Canadian entertainment industry for about 15 years, he moved back to the South Shore. Reconnecting with his roots taught him to truly appreciate the beautiful, magical, and inspirational place that is Nova Scotia. The Great Lunenburglary is his first novel, and a love letter to his home.
Merilyn Simonds, author of Walking with Beth: Conversations with My 100-year old Friend (Penguin Random House, September 2025)
Writing for me is not intentional. I don’t sit down and think, Okay! I’m going to write a book about xxx. The truth is I never realize I’m writing a book until words start massing on the page.
I have never paid attention to birthdays except as an excuse for parties. The usual landmarks of 30, 50, 65 passed without notice, but the year I turned seventy, I felt a seismic shift. My mother died at 75. After a lifetime of thinking the future was elsewhere, the end had suddenly entered the room.
My friend Beth turned a hundred the year I turned seventy, so I called her. Can I visit? I asked, thinking she might be able to give me tips on how to navigate that terra incognita between one’s allotted threescore and ten and whatever came next. Let’s go for a walk, she said.
Over the next three years we walked and talked about everything— passions that sustain a life over decades, being alive to the world, friendship. We shared books and art and dancing. We made notes, and somehow, the words accumulated until those conversations became a book.
Beth and I still walk on Wednesdays whenever we are able. She is 105, still living on her own although she gave up driving in the spring. I am 75, still engrossed in this friendship that means the world to me.
You should write a sequel, people say, but no words are massing on the page.
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MERILYN SIMONDS is author of twenty books, most recently Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay, an innovative memoir/biography of Lawrence, an extraordinary self-trained ornithologist who became one of Canada’s greatest naturalists. Born in Winnipeg, Merilyn grew up in small-town Ontario and Brazil. She published her first book in 1979 at the age of 29, and since then her work has been anthologized and published internationally in eight countries. She writes in a wide variety of genres—personal essay, memoir, travel, literary fiction (such as the novel The Holding, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice) and creative nonfiction, including The Convict Lover, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction. In 2017, Project Bookmark Canada installed a plaque on the site of the former Kingston Penitentiary rock quarry to honour the place of The Convict Lover in Canada’s literary landscape.
David Elias, author of Into the Dark (Radiant Press, October 2025)
I was a kid living on a farm in the Pembina Valley of southern Manitoba when American network television started to invade the folk society I’d been born into. Before I knew it, I was sitting down in front of a primitive black and white TV to watch Liberace and Cassius Clay ham it up together on the Ed Sullivan Show. Then, up in the big city (Winnipeg), Marshall McLuhan got busy explaining how pretty soon the medium was going to be the message, and right about that time Walter Kronkite appeared on the screen, took off his glasses, and announced to the world that the future we all thought we were headed for had just gone up in smoke.
Years later, I set out to write about it, but every time I tried it was like the hyena stalking the dying man in Hemingway’s story, The Snows of Kilimanjaro. That image had always haunted me. The way the hyena appeared out of the darkness just beyond the reach of the firelight and “slipped lightly along the edge of it…” I drilled down through all the layers of inner psychology at work in Otto Rank’s masterpiece Art and Artist, and somehow managed to conjure up enough fictional characters to herd into a novel.
The big question was, where would the dark end and the light begin? Or would it be the other way around? I threw in some comedy relief by adding a couple of hideous clowns to banter about all the shit that was going down in those early sixties. I looked forward to the moment when I dared to ask the question I dreaded most: “Am I having fun yet?” But first, trouble and turmoil and torture. An attempt at art by an artless blacksmith. Otto Rank lurking in the weeds. If it was going to be about light and dark, how would I know whether either one could be trusted? What better reason to write a novel than to choreograph a dance between the two.
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David Elias is the author of seven books, most recently The Truth about the Barn: A Voyage of Discovery and Contemplation, published by Great Plains Publications. It was featured in the Winnipeg Free Press as one of the top titles for 2020. His most recent work of fiction is an historical novel, Elizabeth of Bohemia: A Novel about Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen. It was published in 2019 by ECW Press, and was a finalist for The Margaret Lawrence Award for Fiction at The Manitoba Book Awards. His previous works have been up for numerous awards including the McNally Robinson Book of the Year, the Amazon First Novel Award, and The Journey Prize. His short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies across the country, and in addition to writing he spends time as a mentor, creative writing instructor, and editor. He lives in Winnipeg, Canada.
